rambling, ranting, reccing, running
The other night we saw Troy, which was not nearly as bad as somehow I had expected it to be. I mean, it would have been nice if they'd selected a standard accent to use, so that Odysseus hadn't sounded like he was from Sheffield. :-) And some of the dialogue was kinda stoopid. But I didn't get bored for the nearly 3 hour running time, and there was lots of eye candy (read: good-looking people in attractive yet skimpy costumes. And horses).
Pretty much the only characters who seemed to have any sense at all were Odysseus and Hector, which made me think that maybe if they had just sat down and had a couple of beers with each other, this whole Trojan War thing could have been avoided. (Also made me think of Eric Bana/Sean Bean RPF la la la.) It also made me realize that yeah, I like my men older and a little scruffy, because Orlando Bloom made a very pretty Paris, but Not My Type. Although I just don't find Brad Pitt attractive at all, even though he meets my age criterion. On the other hand, Peter O'Toole as King Priam? Yum.
And that got me thinking a little about Star Trek: Reboot and why it is not my fandom. One reason is that I don't find the characters and actors physically attractive (except for Uhura/Zoe Saldana, but I mostly don't swing that way; I have a very specific type for women, and she's not it). They're all so young! Actually, if I was going to hit on any of the characters it would have been Pike. And McCoy while he was scruffy on the shuttle. Clean-shaven I don't think he's very good-looking. Although character-wise he was one of my favorites, and yes, I'll read the occasional Kirk/McCoy, because that's what pinged me in the movie, even though neither Chris Pine nor James Dean!Kirk appeals to me.
Another reason why it is not my fandom is that I am finding it hard to get into the fanfic, and the reason I am finding it hard to get into the fanfic is that much of it is written in present tense, which in general I do not like. I did a survey, counting all ST:reboot stories posted or recced on my flists (and friendsfriends) yesterday: 14 present tense, 7 past. Incidentally I also scanned the kirk_mccoy comm and found 1) roughly equal amounts of present and past tense, and 2) roughly one story that was even readable by my standards of spelling, grammar, plot, etc. This might mean that the better writers (or the more popular ones) prefer present tense; this might mean that fandom at large prefers it; this might mean that I had too small a sample size to draw any conclusions at all.
Personally I find present tense distancing, telling and not showing, as though there is some narrator giving me a sports-style play-by-play of what's happening. He walks through the door and looks around the room. He shoots, he scores. Past tense, on the other hand, generally inserts itself directly into my head as the account of what happened. It's invisible. And that's why I prefer it.
Yes, I have written stories in present tense, although those are by far the minority. I don't mind it for vignettes, much, but anything longer than a scene, where time passes, it starts to irritate me. Actually, what I mean to say is: if I notice it, it irritates me. If the story comes through and the tense is invisible to me, it's okay, and that usually happens only in vignette-y little ficlets.
Now, I recognize that these are my own damn issues, and I don't actually expect fandom to dance like puppets to my tune. (Darn.) I deal. But I am not getting what I want from ST: Reboot, so I'm not too interested in the fandom.
What I do want, I realized after contributing a bunch of prompts to the Porn Battle and having a little discussion with
catechism, are RPF crossovers. Like Geoffrey Tennant/CKR, or Viggo Mortensen/Richard Sharpe. (Written in past tense. :-) And speaking of crossovers, I absolutely have to rec this magnificent story:
Sharpe's Demon by splix | Sharpe/The Prophecy crossover, Lucifer/Sharpe, short story, NC17. In India, Sharpe (and this is bookverse Sharpe, pre-movie-series) encounters a stranger. I have not seen The Prophecy, in which Lucifer is played by (as you might guess) Viggo Mortensen, but the Devil is recognizably enough the Devil that I didn't need to. And I am entirely in love with this story, from the younger, more venial Sharpe (I recall reading somewhere a quote about Bean playing great villains, and that Sharpe is a villain that happens to be one of the heroes) to the casual and tiny reveals of the Devil's identity that speak to the reader but that Sharpe doesn't recognize. (I adore the unreliable narrator aspect of this, the complicity of the reader in the underlying truths of the story that are hidden from the narrator!) Fabulous.
Whew. That's enough typing. Just one more thing: I know some of you are, like me, runners, and I wanted to point to the new-ish
runners community.
[xposted to http://isis.dreamwidth.org/7493.html. Comment where you like.]
Pretty much the only characters who seemed to have any sense at all were Odysseus and Hector, which made me think that maybe if they had just sat down and had a couple of beers with each other, this whole Trojan War thing could have been avoided. (Also made me think of Eric Bana/Sean Bean RPF la la la.) It also made me realize that yeah, I like my men older and a little scruffy, because Orlando Bloom made a very pretty Paris, but Not My Type. Although I just don't find Brad Pitt attractive at all, even though he meets my age criterion. On the other hand, Peter O'Toole as King Priam? Yum.
And that got me thinking a little about Star Trek: Reboot and why it is not my fandom. One reason is that I don't find the characters and actors physically attractive (except for Uhura/Zoe Saldana, but I mostly don't swing that way; I have a very specific type for women, and she's not it). They're all so young! Actually, if I was going to hit on any of the characters it would have been Pike. And McCoy while he was scruffy on the shuttle. Clean-shaven I don't think he's very good-looking. Although character-wise he was one of my favorites, and yes, I'll read the occasional Kirk/McCoy, because that's what pinged me in the movie, even though neither Chris Pine nor James Dean!Kirk appeals to me.
Another reason why it is not my fandom is that I am finding it hard to get into the fanfic, and the reason I am finding it hard to get into the fanfic is that much of it is written in present tense, which in general I do not like. I did a survey, counting all ST:reboot stories posted or recced on my flists (and friendsfriends) yesterday: 14 present tense, 7 past. Incidentally I also scanned the kirk_mccoy comm and found 1) roughly equal amounts of present and past tense, and 2) roughly one story that was even readable by my standards of spelling, grammar, plot, etc. This might mean that the better writers (or the more popular ones) prefer present tense; this might mean that fandom at large prefers it; this might mean that I had too small a sample size to draw any conclusions at all.
Personally I find present tense distancing, telling and not showing, as though there is some narrator giving me a sports-style play-by-play of what's happening. He walks through the door and looks around the room. He shoots, he scores. Past tense, on the other hand, generally inserts itself directly into my head as the account of what happened. It's invisible. And that's why I prefer it.
Yes, I have written stories in present tense, although those are by far the minority. I don't mind it for vignettes, much, but anything longer than a scene, where time passes, it starts to irritate me. Actually, what I mean to say is: if I notice it, it irritates me. If the story comes through and the tense is invisible to me, it's okay, and that usually happens only in vignette-y little ficlets.
Now, I recognize that these are my own damn issues, and I don't actually expect fandom to dance like puppets to my tune. (Darn.) I deal. But I am not getting what I want from ST: Reboot, so I'm not too interested in the fandom.
What I do want, I realized after contributing a bunch of prompts to the Porn Battle and having a little discussion with
catechism, are RPF crossovers. Like Geoffrey Tennant/CKR, or Viggo Mortensen/Richard Sharpe. (Written in past tense. :-) And speaking of crossovers, I absolutely have to rec this magnificent story:
Sharpe's Demon by splix | Sharpe/The Prophecy crossover, Lucifer/Sharpe, short story, NC17. In India, Sharpe (and this is bookverse Sharpe, pre-movie-series) encounters a stranger. I have not seen The Prophecy, in which Lucifer is played by (as you might guess) Viggo Mortensen, but the Devil is recognizably enough the Devil that I didn't need to. And I am entirely in love with this story, from the younger, more venial Sharpe (I recall reading somewhere a quote about Bean playing great villains, and that Sharpe is a villain that happens to be one of the heroes) to the casual and tiny reveals of the Devil's identity that speak to the reader but that Sharpe doesn't recognize. (I adore the unreliable narrator aspect of this, the complicity of the reader in the underlying truths of the story that are hidden from the narrator!) Fabulous.
Whew. That's enough typing. Just one more thing: I know some of you are, like me, runners, and I wanted to point to the new-ish
runners community.
[xposted to http://isis.dreamwidth.org/7493.html. Comment where you like.]